Why do programmer personality types matter?

How do programmers differ, and why should you care? Steven Clarke from Microsoft’s usability labs has identified and demonstrated at least three different programmer styles, which has been reported in quite afewplaces, hence programmers do indeed differ. The types Clarke found are:

THE SYSTEMATIC DEVELOPER: Writes code defensively. Does everything he or she can to protect code from unstable and untrustworthy processes running in parallel with their code. Develops a deep understanding of a technology before using it. Prides himself or herself on building elegant solutions.THE PRAGMATIC DEVELOPER: Writes code methodically. Develops sufficient understanding of a technology to enable competent use of it. Prides himself or herself on building robust applications.THE OPPORTUNISTIC DEVELOPER: Writes code in an exploratory fashion. Develops a sufficient understanding of a technology to understand how it can solve a business problem. Prides himself/herself on solving business problems.

Now why should you care?

Almost every mention I’ve seen of this online – or of any other personality type categorization system – is usually followed by a “which type are you?”. This misses the point utterly and completely. Psychological research like this first becomes really valueable when you stop thinking about yourself and start asking how this can help you understandother people. If you design API’s and base your design on what makes most sense to your own coding style, you will create something that two thirds of your audience will find difficult to use. Even if you don’t like or agree with their style.

Granted, that makes the assumption that programmers are always equally distributed among styles, which is a pretty wild assumption. The point is that other people are more likely to think differently than similarly to you.

That is also a good thing to keep in mind when formatting code for readability: if your coding style differs from standard Perl Tidy or your company’s coding standard, keep in mind that you are not formatting for yourself, but a colleague, maintainer or anonymous CPAN downloader. They are more likely to understand a common standard than your standard. It sounds obvious, don’t it? I don’t think many (any) programmers think like this even so.

Now, Clarke, in an article to Dr. Dobbs Journal, has an example of a cognitive mapping of programmer types and API traits which is quite illustrative. In Figure 1, thick blue lines shows the expectations of a particular programmer type, while the dark lines shows the score of a particular API. As you can see in this case, the match is bad. Now the good thing is that Clarke’s research gives you a framework to discuss how and why.